Favorite Recorded Scream: at last, a record that’s really worth shouting about

A new LP samples 74 recorded screams. It’s a raucous delight.

Loud and proud: Björk is one of 74 artists to contribute an ear-piercing shriek to 'Favorite Recorded Scream'

By Sukhdev Sandhu

3:05PM BST 14 Aug 2009

A few years back, LeRoy Stevens, a young artist living and working in Chicago, was listening to an album by the obscure but influential soul outfit Baby Huey and the Babysitters. One song in particular, a Curtis Mayfield-produced version of A Change Is Going To Come, grabbed his attention. “It’s a scream. It came from out of nowhere. It was amazing, ear-piercing. Huey holds it for a real long time, about 20 seconds. It was the first time I’d heard anything like that. The sound he made wasn’t about an extension of language. It was pure.”

So began Stevens’s fascination with the recorded scream. Rifling through his collection, he found that many of his favourite records – from the Beatles to hard-core punk – were studded with whooping, hollering and caterwauling. Rock ’n’ roll, it seemed, had never lost touch with its roots in the ecstatic noisemaking of Shakers, evangelical Christians and wild bluesmen. Indeed, the very essence of rock ’n’ roll – fierce affirmation, a refusal to do and think as one has been told, a fundamental need for release – is itself a kind of rebel yell.

After moving to New York in 2008, Stevens, who likes to work on art projects which involve making experimental use of public spaces, visited every record store in Manhattan and handed their clerks a questionnaire asking them to name their favourite scream and why they liked it. He then laboriously rooted out every title, isolated the screams, and delicately mixed them to make a three-minute and 12-second long track comprised of 74 screams – from Puccini to Björk, Rahsaan Roland Kirk to Linkin Park.

The result, available on a 12-inch LP simply entitled Favorite Recorded Scream, is a superb marriage of concept and execution, as meticulous a deconstruction and re-examination of pop music’s formal elements as anything that has recently emerged from the world of sound art. Each play reveals new details and fascinations: the brevity of the screams seems in sync with modern ring tones, while their splurges of noise recall the sessions Extreme Noise Terror and Napalm Death once recorded for John Peel. Playful, jaw-droppingly strange and dynamic, it’s that rare thing: a piece of music that is equally at home in a downtown gallery and at a raucous house party.

The record, whose B-side includes all the scream tracks with 10-second pauses between each of them, making it highly covetable for DJs on the look out for intriguing sounds to sample, also serves as a valentine to record stores. “They’re sites where you can exchange ideas and views,” explains Stevens, who points out that even in a city famous for its crate-diggers and vinyl fiends, record stores are becoming harder to find. “There are none in Harlem. They’ve been knocked down for condos.” Some listed in the poster that accompanies the LP have already disappeared.

The explanations that the record-store clerks gave for their choice of screams (reproduced in full at www.leroystevens.info/) range from the geeky (the one in the Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again is praised for its “intensity, duration and timing – it seems to meld into the VCS3 synthesizer’s sound behind it”) to the mysterious (“I’m not telling you, it’s private,” about the Undisputed Truth’s You + Me = Love) to the plain crazed (“It came from a warlock possessed by the devil,” says a fan of Slayer’s At The Gates). Together they represent a group biography of the inner lives of hard-core pop enthusiasts.

Stevens, who says he will resist calls for him to assemble similar LPs based on whispers or giggles, is both flattered and a little unnerved when hipster clerks in New York, some of whom are in bands themselves, bump into him and exclaim: “Hey, it’s the scream guy!” He has no intention to re-press the record and his next project, very different in nature, will involve melting one-cent coins using the sun. Still, he’s delighted with the response his singular art piece has garnered. “It feels so good to be able to share a work with so many people. It’s very different from how a painting operates in a gallery,” he says.